Mermaid Avenue
Billy Bragg and Wilco
Warner Music
Review by James Smith
"The world is filled with people who are no longer needed/ And who try to make slaves of us/ And they have their music and we have ours/ Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare/ And without their musical and ideological miscarriages to compare our song of freedom to/ We'd not have any opposite to compare music with/ And like their drifting wind/ Hitting against no obstacle/ We'd never know its speed, its power." — Woody Guthrie
Mermaid Avenue is the name of the street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, that was home to Woody and Marjorie Guthrie and their children in the years after World War II. There Woody Guthrie wrote hundreds of songs and wondered if he would, like fellow left-wing songwriter Hanns Eisler, be called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Despite the fact that his recording career was more or less over by 1947, he wrote songs until he became too ill to hold a pencil. When Guthrie died in 1967, the tunes for these hundreds of unrecorded songs were lost forever.
Billy Bragg and Guthrie have much in common. Bragg, an English protest singer, and Guthrie may be separated by 50 years and an ocean, but they are linked by the folk music tradition and the power of the dissenting voice.
In the late 1930s, '40s and '50s, Guthrie wrote from a left-wing standpoint and succeeded in injecting powerful rhetoric into his music. Guthrie had the motto "This guitar kills fascists" stuck to the side of his guitar.
Throughout the 1980s, Bragg championed political causes like the 1984-85 British coalminers' strike and Artists Against Apartheid, and played countless benefits. He was also founder of Red Wedge, a pressure group of musicians dedicated to ousting the Conservative government.
In 1992, Bragg was invited to play at Guthrie's 80th birthday concert in New York's Central Park. His interpretation of two Guthrie numbers, along with his own song concerning labour unions and international solidarity, impressed Guthrie's daughter Nora.
Nora Guthrie approached Bragg in 1995 with the idea of writing some new music to accompany her father's lost songs. Bragg was given access to more than 1000 complete Guthrie lyrics.
The intention of Mermaid Avenue was to give Guthrie's work a new sound and context. The result is not a tribute album but a pan-generational, trans-Atlantic collaboration. Recorded with US band Wilco, Mermaid Avenue's 15 tracks illustrate just how timeless and universal Guthrie's sentiments and beliefs were.
The album contains visions of Guthrie's Oklahoma childhood in "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key". The song is a playful tale about a penniless child with the voice of an angel. There are mid-century love songs like "Hesitating Beauty", "At My Window Sad and Lonely" and "Birds and Ships", which features the voice of Natalie Merchant.
"She Came Along to Me", written in 1942, celebrates the often unacknowledged contributions women make to working-class struggle: "But never, never, never/ Never could it have been done/ If the women hadn't entered the deal/ Like she came along to me."
The song also champions the day the international working class unites: "I suppose 10 million years from now/ We'll all be just alike/ Same colour, same size, working together/ And maybe we'll have all the fascists out of the way by then."
Bill Kelty should listen to "I Guess I Planted" to remind him of the importance of militant industrial campaigns instead of setting up a new bank with union superannuation funds. The satirical "Christ for President" highlights the contradictions of capitalism: "Every year we waste enough to feed the ones who starve/ We build our civilisation up and we shoot it down with wars."
"Eisler on the Go" is a tribute to Hanns Eisler, who was imprisoned by the Truman regime for his "un-American" activities. "Another Man's Done Gone" is Guthrie's self-exploration of desensitisation, a process we all endure to cope with the social disintegration that surrounds us.
"Hoodoo Voodoo" is a light-hearted, up-beat nonsense song Guthrie wrote for his children.
Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett provide a range of vocal colours by sharing the singing with Bragg.
Mermaid Avenue is a fabulous blend of folk, country and pop offering a picture of a man who for 60 years has been vilified by the US right and canonised by the left.
Bragg arrives in Australia in April for a national tour with his band, the Blokes. He will be performing material from the album, as well as a selection of past gems.
The tour schedule is: Brisbane — April 10 at the Brisbane Arena; Sydney — April 13 and 14 at the Enmore Theatre; Canberra — April 16 at the ANU Refectory; Hobart — April 18 at University of Tasmania; Melbourne — April 20 and 21 at the Forum; Adelaide — April 23 at the Thebarton Theatre; and Perth — April 25 at the Sandringham.